Maybe...
So, we rise from the rubble...
Sunday, October 17, 2021
"Only Human..."
"A person who is going to commit an inhuman act invariably
excuses himself to himself by saying, 'I'm only human, after all.'"
- Sydney J. Harris
Only human... compared to what?
○
"Whenever I hear someone sigh and say life is so hard
I'm always tempted to ask 'Compared to what?'"
- Sydney J. Harris
○
Full screen recommended.
Billy Joel, "You're Only Human"
"Truth..."
"If Truth is taken away from us, then Right and Wrong are taken from us as well. If we don't know Right and Wrong, then we can't, we won't control ourselves, but will look to someone else to bring order through brute force and raw power. We will be controlled by a tyrant, and we will no longer be free."
- Frank Perettio
"Internet Sacred Text Archive"
“About Sacred-Texts”
“All ancient books which have once been called sacred by man, will have their lasting place in the history of mankind, and those who possess the courage, the perseverance, and the self-denial of the true miner, and of the true scholar, will find even in the darkest and dustiest shafts what they are seeking for, - real nuggets of thought, and precious jewels of faith and hope.”
- Max Müller, "Introduction to the Upanishads" Vol. II.
“This site is a freely available archive of electronic texts about religion, mythology, legends and folklore, and occult and esoteric topics. Texts are presented in English translation and, where possible, in the original language. This site has no particular agenda other than promoting religious tolerance and scholarship. Views expressed at this site are solely those of specific authors, and are not endorsed by sacred-texts. Sacred-texts is not sponsored by any religious group or organzation.
Sacred texts went live on March 9th, 1999. The traffic started to increase when sacred-texts was listed at Yahoo! under ‘Society and Religion | Texts’. In its first year of operation sacred-texts had about a quarter million hits. By 2004, it was receiving well over a quarter million hits per day.
Today, site traffic often exceeds a million hits a day. Sacred texts is one of the top 20,000 sites on the web based on site traffic, consistently one of the top 10,000 sites in Australia, the US and India, and is one of the top 5 most visited general religion sites (source: Alexa.com).
The texts presented here are either original scans from books and articles clearly in the public domain, material which has been presented elsewhere on the Internet, or material included under fair use conditions in printed anthologies.
Many of the texts included here were originally posted in ftp archives or on bulletin boards before the growth of the World Wide Web and have been lost. In some cases, the texts were posted in such a form as to make them unusable by non-technically oriented users. Some of these texts were on the web at some point but have completely disappeared because the site they were posted on has closed. Thus the need for an archive which organizes this material in a persistent location.
From the start, we have had a special focus on remedying the under-representation of traditional cultures on the Internet. The site has one of the largest collections of transcriptions of complete books on Native American, Pacific, African, Asian and other traditional people’s religion, spiritual practices, mythology and folklore. While many of these pre-20th century books are flawed due to orientalist or colonialist biases, they are also eye-witness accounts by reliable observers, typically at the moment of contact. These texts are crucial to the study of tribal traditions, and in many cases, the only link with the past. Locked up in academic libraries for decades, sacred-texts has made them freely accessible anywhere in the world.
We have scanned hundreds of books which have all been made freely accessible to the world. A comprehensive bibliography of the texts scanned at sacred texts is available here. https://www.sacred-texts.com/stbib.htm
We welcome email regarding typographical or factual errors in any file at sacred-texts. Please write us if you spot an error; include the URL and a few lines of context so we can pin down the location.
While all due care has been taken in the reproduction of the texts here, none of the texts or translations here are represented to be sanctioned by any particular religious body or institution. We welcome advice as to errors of fact or transcription.
Some of the material here may be copyrighted. It is our hope that the copyright holders may allow these texts to be posted here in the public interest. If you are the copyright holder of record of a text which you believe has been archived at this site in error, please contact us at the email address listed at the bottom of this page. We have made a good-faith effort to determine the provenance of each text and apologize if we have posted a text in error. Note: If you are requesting the removal of a file, you must be the copyright holder of the file, and you must specify the exact URL of the file.”
Fascinating, an absolute treasure trove! Enjoy!
“The Web Gallery of Art”
“The Web Gallery of Art”
“The Web Gallery of Art is a virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture of the Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassicism, Romanticism and Realism periods (1100-1850), currently containing over 51,400 reproductions. It was started in 1996 as a topical site of the Renaissance art, originated in the Italian city-states of the 14th century and spread to other countries in the 15th and 16th centuries. Intending to present Renaissance art as comprehensively as possible, the scope of the collection was later extended to show its Medieval roots as well as its evolution to Baroque and Rococo via Mannerism. More recently the periods of Neoclassicism and Romanticism were also included.
The collection has some of the characteristics of a virtual museum. The experience of the visitors is enhanced by guided tours helping to understand the artistic and historical relationship between different works and artists, by period music of choice in the background and a free postcard service. At the same time the collection serves the visitors’ need for a site where various information on art, artists and history can be found together with corresponding pictorial illustrations. Although not a conventional one, the collection is a searchable database supplemented by a glossary containing articles on art terms, relevant historical events, personages, cities, museums and churches.
The Web Gallery of Art is intended to be a free resource of art history primarily for students and teachers. It is a private initiative not related to any museums or art institutions, and not supported financially by any state or corporate sponsors. However, we do our utmost, using authentic literature and advice from professionals, to ensure the quality and authenticity of the content.
We are convinced that such a collection of digital reproductions, containing a balanced mixture of interlinked visual and textual information, can serve multiple purposes. On one hand it can simply be a source of artistic enjoyment; a convenient alternative to visiting a distant museum, or an incentive to do just that. On the other hand, it can serve as a tool for public education both in schools and at home.”
"Luminarium"
“I have undertaken a labor, a labor out of love for the world, and to comfort noble hearts: those that I hold dear, and the world to which my heart goes out. Not the common world do I mean, of those who (as I have heard) cannot bear grief and desire but to bathe in bliss. (May God then let them dwell in bliss!) Their world and manner of life my tale does not regard: it's life and mine lie apart. Another world do I hold in mind, which bears together in one heart its bitter sweetness and its dear grief, its heart's delight and its pain of longing, dear life and sorrowful death, dear death and sorrowful life. In this world let me have my world, to be damned with it, or to be saved.”
- Gottfried Von Strassburg
A treasure for those who love the language...
The Poet: James Broughton, "Having Come This Far"
"Having Come This Far"
"I've been through what my through was to be,
I did what I could and couldn't.
I was never sure how I would get there.
I nourished an ardor for thresholds,
for stepping stones and for ladders,
I discovered detour and ditch.
I swam in the high tides of greed,
I built sandcastles to house my dreams.
I survived the sunburns of love.
No longer do I hunt for targets.
I've climbed all the summits I need to,
and I've eaten my share of lotus.
Now I give praise and thanks
for what could not be avoided,
and for every foolhardy choice.
I cherish my wounds and their cures,
and the sweet enervations of bliss.
My book is an open life.
I wave goodbye to the absolutes,
and send my regards to infinity.
I'd rather be blithe than correct.
Until something transcendent turns up,
I splash in my poetry puddle,
and try to keep God amused."
- James Broughton
"The Monstrous Thing..."
"The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured - disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui - in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off."
- Henry Miller, “Tropic of Cancer”
"Subway Sandwich Is Disgusting; Talking To Zombies; You Will Lose Your House And Be Happy"
Jeremiah Babe, PM 10/16/21:
"Subway Sandwich Is Disgusting; Talking To Zombies;
You Will Lose Your House And Be Happy"
Saturday, October 16, 2021
"The End of Banking and Money as We Know It"
"The End of Banking and Money as We Know It"
by Dan Denning
"The German military strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously said that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” But when it comes to money – public money issued by the government versus private money made by nature and issued by God (gold) or secured by cryptography and limited in supply (bitcoin) – politics has become the continuation of war by other means.
The United States has all but declared war on sound money… and your financial privacy. I say “all but declared” because as we know, Congress has shirked its Constitutional obligation to declare war for decades. It does so only rhetorically, and only against ideas or concepts, like “terror,” “poverty”, or “drugs.”
But the government has ended the war in Afghanistan (on terror) only so it can focus more fully on its war here in the United States… on you. It’s an all-out war on your freedom of speech, your freedom of movement, your right to privacy, and on private money itself.
President Biden has proposed to create a new army of (over 80,000) IRS investigators to close the “tax gap” – Washington D.C.’s term for the difference between what Americans owe in taxes and what they are actually paying. The proposal – buried in a report put out earlier this year by the Treasury Department – would require that any inflow or outflow of more than $600 into any of your financial accounts during the year be automatically (and electronically) reported to the IRS by the financial account provider through which the money flowed.
Evidently, this was a bridge too far, even for some Democrats in Congress. Last month, they announced plans to set a threshold higher than $600. Responding to claims that the $600 level would “weaponize” the IRS against ordinary Americans, and lead to abuse and misuse, they assured critics they are only after real tax cheats.
But note that they didn’t reject outright the idea of total financial surveillance. They agree with that principle. They’re only arguing now, it would seem, over the size of the transaction at which reporting is compulsory. And as you know, whatever size transaction they determine now could be revised later (and lower).
New Currency Czar: What you’re seeing is an all-out counterattack by the state against sound money and financial privacy. Enter Saule Omarova, the academic Joe Biden nominated last week to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). She’s the biggest threat to a fully centralized (and weaponized) national money system since the introduction of the greenback to finance the Civil War.
Officially, Omarova is a Ukrainian immigrant and academic from Cornell. Unofficially, she’s a monetary Marxist revolutionary, with ambitions to “end banking as we know it” and completely centralize the creation of money and allocation of capital and credit in the economy. She’s yet another in the long line of public officials and academics who want to “transform” America as we know it.
In Omarova’s case, she wants to remove all retail banking accounts to the Federal Reserve. Then, with that money as a deposit base, she wants to radically expand on the government’s ability to borrow even more money, to be invested by a National Infrastructure Authority.
Here are some of her most dangerous ideas in her own words, from a paper written last year: "Massive inflows of deposit money [formerly in retail banks] would create both new pressures on, and new opportunities for, the Fed to channel resources to productive use in the nation’s economy. By not addressing, or even acknowledging, these potentially game-changing implications of FedAccounts for system-wide credit allocation, the current debate overlooks the full transformative potential of this reform. It also precludes a deeper discussion of how FedAccounts could affect the structure and operation of the U.S. financial system. Glossing over these consequences obscures potentially significant policy choices involved in the process.
My new working paper seeks to shift the debate by confronting these fundamental questions. The paper advocates a comprehensive reform of the structure and systemic function of the Fed’s balance sheet as the basis for redesigning the core architecture of modern finance. It offers a blueprint for transforming the Fed’s balance sheet into what it calls the People’s Ledger: the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating sovereign credit and money in a democratic economy.
[…]
The Fed would invest in securities issued by existing and newly-created public instrumentalities for the purposes of financing large-scale public infrastructure projects. One such new public instrumentality is the National Investment Authority (NIA), a development-finance institution proposed elsewhere. As proposed, the NIA would act directly in financial markets as a lender, guarantor, securitizer, and venture capitalist with a broad mandate to mobilize, amplify, and direct public and private capital to where it’s needed most.
Accordingly, by purchasing NIA-issued bonds, the Fed would be investing in the long-term development of the nation’s economic capacity. In effect, it would be offsetting the dramatic increase in its own liabilities by dramatically augmenting the flow of credit into the coordinated nationwide construction of public infrastructure that enables and facilitates structurally balanced, socially inclusive and sustainable economic growth."
This paper, called "The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy," goes beyond anything the Chicago Plan envisioned in 1933.
It’s a complete centralization of the nation’s financial resources. And it puts private wealth in the service of financing “investing” decisions made by “deciders” in Washington, D.C. Their investment goals are things like “equity,” “inclusivity,” and “sustainability.”
The big battle in this war is who gets to say what money is. This is why you’re seeing what looks like a coordinated pushback by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Reserve, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on cryptocurrencies, stable coins, and digital assets.
Cryptocurrencies and gold aren’t legal tender, by law (except certain minted coins). But they are still a threat to the government’s monopoly on money, and all the control that enables them to exert over you. The crux of the matter is that Washington wants to replace a centralized and inflationary banking system run by Wall Street (which owns the Federal Reserve) with a centralized inflationary banking system run by the insiders in the D.C. swamp.
As corrupt and dangerous to your wealth as the current system (run by Wall Street) is, one run by the D.C. elite, who redefine money as central bank digital currency and then demand total financial surveillance of your life, is not an improvement. It’s as bad as, if not worse than, anything the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have in mind. In fact, it’s probably exactly what the CCP has in mind. But don’t expect the radicals who support that plan here to be that transparent."
Chief Tecumseh, "So Live Your Life"
Full screen recommended.
RedFrost Motivation,
Chief Tecumseh, "So Live Your Life"
Read by Shane Morris
Friday, October 15, 2021
"Chaos At Sea: 1 Million Containers Are Now Stuck Off US Ports As Shipping Crisis Accelerates"
Full screen recommended.
"Chaos At Sea: 1 Million Containers Are Now
Stuck Off US Ports As Shipping Crisis Accelerates"
by Epic Economist
"The largest ports in the US are facing a record-breaking backlog of cargo ships, which altogether are carrying almost one million containers that are now stuck offshore. In the port of Los Angeles alone, nearly half a million 20-foot shipping containers - carrying 12 million metric tons of goods - are waiting for a berth along the port to dock and finally unload their massive cargo volume, according to data released by the Marine Exchange of Southern California. At the moment, the port has 19 mega-container ships waiting to dock, the largest of which is carrying roughly 20,000 20-foot shipping containers.
Along with the port of Long Beach, there are currently 90 container ships at the coast of California, 63 of which are still waiting off the shore, a number that largely exceeds the 2019 average of zero to one ship at anchor. Given the unprecedented congestion along the shore, some carriers have decided to relocate their ships to other ports. However, the situation is similarly chaotic at the ports of Savannah and New York. At least 24 ships are still waiting off of the Port of Savannah, an all-time record. And nine mega-ships are off the Port of New York City. The new volume arriving is rapidly overwhelming the facilities in both areas.
Nationwide, almost one million containers are now stuck outside US ports and waiting for a spot to dock and get unpacked. And this shocking number may escalate even further as more and more ships arrive to deliver holiday goods. On the other hand, waiting times at the port for these ships can extend for as long as a month and a half. This week, one vessel from Asia that had been waiting off the coast since September 5 was finally unloaded after more than 40 days of waiting - a problem experts warn will cause widespread shipping delays in the run-up for the holiday shopping season.
Of course, the U.S. is not the only country dealing with a massive backlog of containers. Over the weekend, Bloomberg reported that a series of new restrictions and shutdowns had created a "ripple effect" and pushed the prices of goods across the globe higher. Industry executives have warned that they now expect the shipping crisis to last until 2023. The supply chain bottlenecks are expected to create major issues for holiday shoppers, that's why retail giants, such as Walmart, are now chartering their own vessels in an effort to beat the disruptions that threaten to jeopardize the retail sector's make-or-break holiday season. Other big retailers, including Target, Home Depot, Costco, and Dollar Tree, have also said they will chartering ships to transport their goods during the holiday season. An extraordinary phenomenon that Steve Ferreira, the head of shipping consultancy Ocean Audit, has described as "Containergeddon."
According to Burt Flickinger, the managing director at retail consultancy Strategic Resource Group, at least 25% of the goods stuck on ships are unlikely to make it onto shelves in time for the November 26 Black Friday, seen as the kickoff for the holiday shopping season, when retailers make more than a third of their profits. Another source in the shipping industry told Bloomberg that other firms were snapping up second-hand container vessels of all sizes. And while these big companies can afford to charter their own ships to get their goods in time, smaller companies can't, which gives a huge advantage to the big corporative players at the expense of small businesses. Just take a moment to consider the economic implications of that and the imbalances created in our pricing system.
One giant shipping company in Japan is now looking to charter a ship for $130,000 a day for three years, which would have cost about $20,000 in 2020. One U.S. company decided to put up $35 million for the first nine months in cash, on day one. Another one of America's largest big-box retailers just chartered a cargo ship for $80,000 a day for one year that would have cost about $10,000 a day a year ago, and, of course, small- and medium-sized businesses simply cannot compete with them and pay such absurd prices. But this also means that someone is going to pay for those increased transport costs. And who's going to pay for all that? You are! We all are. The price of goods is going to explode in the coming months, and if that doesn’t scream inflation to you, you're not paying attention. We're on the verge of an inflationary spike that will stick around for years, and what we experienced so far was just a hint of the crisis that lies ahead."
"Streets of Philadelphia, Kensington Ave 10/14/21"
Full screen recommended.
"Streets of Philadelphia, Kensington Ave 10/14/21"
"Violent crime and drug abuse in Philadelphia as a whole is a major problem. The city’s violent crime rate is higher than the national average and other similarly sized metropolitan areas. Also alarming is Philadelphia’s drug overdose rate. The number of drug overdose deaths in the city increased by 50% from 2013 to 2015, with more than twice as many deaths from drug overdoses as deaths from homicides in 2015. A big part of Philadelphia’s problems stem from the crime rate and drug abuse in Kensington.
Because of the high number of drugs in Kensington, the neighborhood has a drug crime rate of 3.57, the third-highest rate by neighborhood in Philadelphia. Like a lot of the country, a big part of this issue is a result of the opioid epidemic. Opioid abuse has skyrocketed over the last two decades in the United States and Philadelphia is no exception. Along with having a high rate of drug overdose deaths, 80% percent of Philadelphia’s overdose deaths involved opioids2 and Kensington is a big contributor to this number. This Philly neighborhood is purportedly the largest open-air narcotics market for heroin on the East Coast with many neighboring residents flocking to the area for heroin and other opioids. With such a high number of drugs in Kensington, many state and local officials have zoned in on this area to try and tackle Philadelphia’s problem."
Musical Interlude: "Beautiful Relaxing Music - Calming Piano & Guitar Music"
Full screen recommended.
Soothing Relaxation,
"Beautiful Relaxing Music - Calming Piano & Guitar Music"
"Beautiful relaxing music by Soothing Relaxation. Enjoy calming piano and
guitar music composed by Peder B. Helland, set to stunning nature videos."
"A Look to the Heavens"
“About 70 million light-years distant, gorgeous spiral galaxy NGC 289 is larger than our own Milky Way. Seen nearly face-on, its bright core and colorful central disk give way to remarkably faint, bluish spiral arms. The extensive arms sweep well over 100 thousand light-years from the galaxy's center.
At the lower right in this sharp, telescopic galaxy portrait the main spiral arm seems to encounter a small, fuzzy elliptical companion galaxy interacting with enormous NGC 289. Of course spiky stars are in the foreground of the scene. They lie within the Milky Way toward the southern constellation Sculptor.”
Chet Raymo, “Take My Arm”
“Take My Arm”
by Chet Raymo
“I’m sure I have referenced here before the poems of Grace Schulman, she who inhabits that sweet melancholy place between “the necessity and impossibility of belief.” Between, too, the necessity and impossibility of love.
Belief and love. They have so much in common, yet are as distinct as self and other. How strange that two people can hitch their lives together, on a whim, say, or wild intuition, knowing little if nothing about the other’s hiddenness, about things that even the other does not fully understand and couldn’t articulate even if he did. Blind, deaf, dumb, they leap into the future, hoping to fly, and, for a moment, soaring, like Icarus, sunward. The necessity of wax. The impossibility of wax. We “fall” in love, they say. Schulman: “We slog. We tramp the road of possibility. Give me your arm.”
The Poet: Wendell Berry, “Leavings”
“Leavings”
“In time a man disappears
from his lifelong fields, from
the streams he has walked beside,
from the woods where he sat and waited.
Thinking of this, he seems to
miss himself in those places
as if always he has been there.
But first he must disappear,
and this he foresees with hope,
with thanks. Let others come.”
- Wendell Berry
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“Perhaps as he was lying awake then, his life may have passed before him – his early hopeful struggles, his manly successes and prosperity, his downfall in his declining years, and his present helpless condition – no chance of revenge against Fortune, which had had the better of him -neither name nor money to bequeath – a spent-out, bootless life of defeat and disappointment, and the end here! Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling, when a day of our life comes and we say, “Tomorrow, success or failure won’t matter much, and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil.”
- William Makepeace Thackeray, “Vanity Fair”
"Grief..."
“The dictionary defines grief as: “Keen mental suffering or distress over affliction of loss; sharp sorrow, painful regret.” We’re taught to learn from and rely on books, on definitions, on definitives but in life, strict definitions rarely apply. In life, grief can look like a lot of things that bear little resemblance to sharp sorrow.
Grief may be a thing we all have in common but it looks different on everyone. It isn’t just death we have to grieve. It’s life, it’s loss, it’s change. And when we wonder why it has to suck so much sometimes, it has to hurt so bad. The thing we gotta try to remember is that it can turn on a dime. That’s how you stay alive when it hurts so much you can’t breathe. That’s how you survive. By remembering that one day, somehow, impossibly, it won’t feel this way. It wont hurt this much. Grief comes in it’s own time for everyone in it’s own way. So the best we can do, the best anyone can do, is try for honesty. The really crappy thing, the very worst part of grief is that you can’t control it. The best we can do is try to let ourselves feel it when it comes and let it go when we can. The very worst part is that the minute you think you’re past it, it starts all over again and always, every time, it takes your breath away.
According to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, when we are dying or have suffered a catastrophic loss, we all move through five distinctive stages of grief. We go into denial because the loss is so unthinkable, we can’t imagine it’s true. We become angry with everyone. We become angry with survivors, angry with ourselves. Then we bargain, we beg, we plead. We offer everything we have. We offer up our souls in exchange for just one more day. When the bargaining has failed and the anger is too hard to maintain, we fall into depression, despair. Until finally we have to accept that we have done everything we can. We let go. We let go and move into acceptance.”
- “Grey’s Anatomy”
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